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Logger-TXT

Over the past few weeks I've been testing a fairly major change to Logger OSX that adds autocomplete to the type and project inputs. I've spent a while sitting on this change as to make it happen, there were some large, behind the scenes, changes that needed to be made. There's a few bugs that were caught, like adding extra blank lines to log files, that were uncovered throughout this process.

Welcome to the Alpha of OSX version of Logger-TXT. This OSX app is still really early in development so be careful with using it as there may be versions that mess with your existing log file. I'm personally using this on my own, 45K line log file so I try my hardest not to mess anything up, but still, use at your own risk. Dropbox versioning is good for recovering from mistakes. If you don't have access to the Alpha yet, I am always looking for more testers so get in touch!

Since Dev Diary #3, a fair amount of work has been done due to trying to get NSPopovers to work reliably with the rest of OSX. Though in its previous state it worked, the overall user experience was unacceptable due to too many unreliable behaviours stemming from trying to use a popover from a menu bar status item. A few issues that were present with the popover implementation were:

Over the past week and a half I've been working on getting what I previously had
moved to the menu bar. Popping open a window was alright but I've always
wanted to create a menu bar app and this was a perfect fit. Already, after just a
few days of testing, the menu bar pop-up feels a lot nicer than a regular window
opening for input.

Development of Logger-TXT OSX has been coming along since Dev Diary #1 and is at the point that I can use it daily for log input. I still have my primary script around for accessing recent items, search, corrections, and general comfortability, but overall, I have the OSX app in use for all input.

The focus for the past week was getting the preferences window and its various settings to work. This involved getting the following to work:

With some free time that has presented itself in the past month, I've decided to clear a few things off my back burner that have been nagging me for a while. One of those things was to learn some Objective-C in order to create OSX and iOS counterparts to my Logger-TXT script. Not everyone enjoys interacting with shell scripts all day so a nice GUI has been a long time coming. Though mobile is a pretty big logging hole at the moment, I figured an OSX app would be an easier place to start.